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Center for Simulation & Modeling

Consulting: The Center employs full-time research faculty (consultants) whose expertise cover a wide range of areas in high performance computing (HPC) and academic research, including parallel programming for distributed, shared memory, and graphical processing units (GPUs). The consultants have expertise in various areas of theoretical and computational science and engineering. The consultants are responsible for preparing training and educational materials, teaching, cluster user support and consulting, and focused research support for various projects at Pitt. SaM provides user support, training, and project management services on a continual basis through its online platforms Core.SaM and Collab.SaM, as well as organizing year round workshops and training sessions on cluster usage, parallel programming, and various topics in HPC-based research. The Center also acts as a liaison for national computational resources, through partnerships with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the NSF/XSEDE Campus Champions program. Please email samhelp@pitt.edu, or fill out this online form to request help.

Hardware: SaM provides in-house shared HPC resources for campus researchers. The systems are housed, administered and maintained in collaboration with CSSD. The HPC cluster, “Frank”, is comprised of high-end hardware that can accommodate a wide range of computational applications, including serial and parallel calculations as well as calculations requiring large memory or disk space. For more details and exact specifications of the hardware, please see the system architecture details on our cluster support site. In order to get time on the SaM cluster apply online. The support website, Core.SaM, contains detailed documentation, a ticketing system and user forums for proactive communication and support for all users of the cluster.

PittGrid: PittGrid is an ongoing project to create a virtual supercomputer by harnessing the unused CPU cycles across the Pitt campus. Many computers across campus are left idle during non-business hours. With permission from individual computer users and Computing Labs, PittGrid virtually organizes these resources and makes them available for research, simulations and computationally demanding projects from Pitt faculty and researchers. These PittGrid resources are available to projects being supported by SAM consultants. For additional information see: www.pittgrid.pitt.edu

CUDA Research Center: SaM has partnered with NVIDIA to serve as a CUDA Research Center. More details are available here.

DARPA Open Catalog

A curated list of DARPA-sponsored software and peer-reviewed publications in the categories of analytics, infrastructure and visualization can be found here.

Other Centers and Facilities

The Center augments the University of Pittsburgh’s already substantial computing footprint, and works closely with other centers at the university: